We are asking quick questions of writers and thinkers coming to the WORD Christchurch Festival 2025 (Wednesday 27 August to Sunday 31 August).
Here are some quick answers from Diana Wichtel, author of Unreel: A life in review.
Share a surprising fact about yourself
When I was little I stuffed my pockets with used bus tickets rescued from puddles because they looked cold and sad.
What makes you JOYOUS?
Wonderful festivals like WORD and all who sail on her. And our five grandchildren and baby great-nephew: I’ll happily trade getting older for the joy they bring.
Diana at WORD Christchurch
You can hear Diana at the session Unreel at The Piano, Friday 29 August 2pm to 3pm.
Diana Wichtel grew up in the glow of the ‘Golden Age of television’. One of New Zealand’s wittiest writers and acclaimed television critics, she joins Steve Braunias for a conversation about her brilliantly funny and nostalgic memoir, Unreel: A Life in Review. Hear how the small screen chronicled her life and formed her career as she weaves personal stories of family, love and loss with the evolving world of the telly.
More about Diana
Diana Wichtel is an award-winning journalist and author. Her family memoir, Driving to Treblinka, won the Royal Society Te Apārangi Award for General Non-fiction at the 2018 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
She was born in Vancouver to a Polish Holocaust survivor father and a Kiwi tradwife mother too busy to police her television viewing. When she was 13 her mother brought her and her two siblings home to New Zealand. She never saw her father again. Wichtel worked at the New Zealand Listener as a television critic, profile writer and feature writer from 1984 until the magazine’s brief closure in April 2020, amassing many awards and a bracing collection of hate mail. She was a columnist for the New Zealand Herald’s Canvas magazine from October 2020 to March 2024. Her 2025 Ockham Book Awards longlisted memoir of a life viewed through the lens of television, Unreel, was published in November 2024.
Find books by Diana Wichtel at the library
More Quick questions with WORD Christchurch guests
More WORD
Check the programme online or pick up a printed copy from your library.
- WORD Christchurch website
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- Our WORD Christchurch 2025 page - Find books by writers coming to this year's festival
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